A Quick Synopsis

Hello Dear Readers,

It's been awhile. I'll try include all I can.

So, last Sunday, the 28th several of us plus Alexei hiked up to the 2 sites by Sacsayhuamán. One was a ritual site, which is being worked on by some Peruvians, and had what is thought to be a temple there. Then we hiked to el Balcon de Diablo, which is another Incan site that we are supposed to be utilizing. It was beautiful. There's a giant cave with a stream running through, and no one has looked at it. We went exploring through the cave, came out the other side, and could see an Incan aquaduct carved into the rock! It was pretty fantastic.
Monday the 29th, nothing really happened. It was a holiday ( the Peruvians love their holidays) so we just hung out around the mansion & cusco.
Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, we were at a Convent in Cusco. It's been renovated by teenagers, and they've turned it into a school. There were 3 projects that the students there were working on that we could also work on : stoneworking, woodworking, and restoration.
Tuesday I was with the woodworkers. It was definitely interesting and fun, but also a lot more difficult that I thought it could be. I made three designs out of 3x1 pieces of wood.
Wednesday, I worked the Art Restoration. I worked on a statue that had 4 layers of paint on it. Blue, white, gold, and red. When the Jesuits had possession of the monestery, they decided that gold was, essentially, sacreligious and painted over the gold statues. The picture I've included is of these golds statues that have been restored. My job was, using a scapel and a yellow goo to help lift the paint off, to remove the blue layer and get to the white layer of paint. I was to stop there, so as not to scratch off any gold, or worse, scrape too deeply and hit the intermost red layer. It was a painstaking process. I sat for hours chipping microscopic blue bits of paint off. I did enjoy it. We also cleaned 17th paintings. This was also a slow process. A small part was sectioned off, and using water-based solution and a stick with a cotton ball wrapped around it, we slowly wiped in a circular fashion to get the dirt off. And that was my week until July 3rd.
My next post will be about the weekend. Stay tuned.
Over and out.
Meg